Posted 4 years ago on Dec. 16, 2013, 2:10 p.m. EST by GirlFriday
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SAN FRANCISCO—Less than 20 miles from the site where melting ice exposed the 5,000-year-old body of Ötzi the Iceman, scientists have discovered new and compelling evidence that the Italian Alps are warming at an unprecedented rate.

Part of that evidence comes in the form of a single dried-out leaf from a larch tree that grew thousands of years ago.
old larch
This 2,600-year-old larch leaf was found buried in ice atop Mt. Ortles in Italy. (Contact Gorder.1@osu.edu for full-size image.)

A six-nation team of glaciologists led by The Ohio State University drilled a set of ice cores from atop Mt. Ortles in northern Italy, and described their early findings on Monday, Dec. 9 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

The Alto dell’Ortles glacier, which did not show signs of melting for thousands of years, now appears to be shifting away from a constantly below-freezing state to one where its upper layers are at the melting point throughout the year, said project leader Paolo Gabrielli, research scientist at Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State.